Harnessing Ignorance to Spark Creativity

I just got an email from a writer who was checking to see if I had argued -- in a talk long ago -- that true innovations come from people who ignore customers. As I told her, I don't recall saying exactly that, but as I argued in Chapters 12 and 13 in Weird Ideas That Work, there are many virtues of ignorance and naivete in the innovation process. At IDEO and the d.school, we talk about "the mind of the child" (see Diego's great post on this at Metacool). Also see this old article I wrote that draws on these chapters.

Indeed, radical innovations do often come from people who don't know what has been or can't be done. I once had a student who worked as an earlier employee at Invisalign (those clear braces that replace the ugly wire things), and he told me that none of the members of the original design team had any background in traditional braces or dentistry. Indeed, at least one history of the company suggests the initial idea came from one of the founders, who had no background in dentistry at all:

The company was founded in 1997 by Mr. Zia Chishti and Ms. Kelsey Wirth, who -- as graduate students at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business -- realized the benefit of applying advanced 3-D computer imaginggraphics to the field of orthodontics. Like many breakthrough inventions, the idea for Invisalign® grew from happenstance.Mr. Chishti wore braces as an adult when working in investment banking at Morgan Stanley, which was awkward and embarrassing. When his braces were removed he wore a clear plastic retainer. He noticed that when he neglected to wear the retainer for several days his teeth would shift back and upon reinsertion his teeth would shift back to their desired, straightened state. It was the observation that a clear plastic device was capable of moving his own teeth that led to Chishti’s conceptualization of a process that became the Invisalign System. A background in computer science gave Chishti the insight that it was possible to design and manufacture an entire series of clear orthodontic devices similar to the retainer he wore, using 3- D computer graphics technology. He and Ms. Wirth started Align Technology in 1997 to realize this vision. And the rest – as they say – is history.

In this vein, Chapter 13 of Weird Ideas That Work offers some guidelines for harnessing innovation:

During the early stages of a project, don’t study how the task has been approached in the company, industry, field, or region where you are working.

If you know a lot about a problem, and how it has been solved in the past, ask people who are ignorant it to study it and help solve it. Young people, including children, can be especially valuable for this task.

Ask new hires (especially those fresh out of school) to solve problems or do tasks that you “know” the answer to or you can’t resolve. Get out of the way for a while to see if they generate some good ideas.

Find analogous problems in different industries, and study how they are solved.

Find people working on analogous issues in different companies, fields, regions, fields, and industries, and ask them how they would solve the problem or do the job.

If people who have the right skills keep failing to solve some problem, try assigning some people with the wrong skills to solve it,

If you are a novice, seek experts to help you, but don’t assume they are right especially if they tell you they are right.

What do you think? Do you have more ideas for harnessing innovation? Do you know of other instructive cases? When is ignorance dangerous and destructive?

Comments

You can follow this conversation by subscribing to the comment feed for this post.

I wonder if, rather than ignorance, it's a lack of arrogance that helps approach problems in a fresh way. Assuming you have all the answers, have seen it all before, and can solve anything, closes the mind to solutions. Put the other way, being able to be vulnerable, being secure in your abilities but willing to show you don't know everything, is more likely to result in new ways of looking at things.

The difficulty is that in some professions, and in our culture in general, 'not knowing' is seen as weak, even shameful.

Great blog entry. People and organizations are regularly locked-in to ways of thinking. These approaches serve them very well at one stage of the lifecycle, but becoming limiting as markets (and technologies) evolve. Work processes, metrics and culture become designed around the original ways things were done - and then it becomes very difficult to do something new.

It takes more than just people who have a fresh look at an old problem to implement change. It takes an approach that addresses the lock-ins, and special teams with permission and resources to operate outside the old bounds. Developing the idea often takes much more effort than merely having it, and unless you have teams allowed and resourced to work in white space forward development will not progress.

I can see how this is so applicable to my field (education) and I know that it is true. I was able to rethink my own curriculum fresh out of school...and no one stopped me. I just did what I thought would work, not knowing any of the rules of curriculum, and somehow it did work; very well in fact.

The concept you discuss applies to the type of brain trust people interact with in their social-biz networks. Seek diversity and seek and bounce ideas off your network. Not just for their perspective but to enhance your own.

Love this concept, Bob. And I think I agree. But I'm curious about how you reconcile the value of ignorance--philosophically, at least--with evidence-based management?

They're not mutually exclusive ideas. But on the other hand, the connection doesn't seem common-sensical, either. Is it merely a timing issue (i.e. leveraging ignorance in the early stages and evidence in the latter stages)?

The history of innovation and invention is replete with examples that support the efficacy of your suggestions for harnessing innovation. Anesthesia was first used as a sideshow attraction until a doctor realized it's medical potential.

As a business owner, I have found that my best ideas come from outside my industry. When I owned a real estate company, I implemented ideas from Walt Disney, the Ritz Carlton, and even Domino's Pizza to build a business that was quite different - in my opinion better - than others.

I love the Invisalign example. I think if the ortho-experts had been asked if this would work, they would have said NO.